What a lovely day! I do believe that I shall wheel myself into town so that I may witness the wonders of the modern world with mine own eyes!
Dave Knapik is a Chicago-based programmer, photographer and writer.
Archive for the 'software' Category
I’ve almost finished consuming everything that the brilliant Lynda.com has to teach me about Adobe Illustrator CS5. As I just learned about Live Trace this week, expect to see an excessive display of tacky photo-based illustrations from me in the near future. I’ll start with this scary zombie I made based on a stock photo of a corporate businesswoman who has rather unfortunately come to dominate many of my daylight hours. Now she can walk the nightmares I have whilst sleeping as well as the ones I have as I bang my head against my desk 37.5 hours each week.
BEHOLD! Zombie… UNLEASHED!
My adventures in learning Illustrator continue! Today I learned how to create text that follows a path. I used my newly acquired powers to create a badge that is very rude indeed. It swears. Twice.
After finally admitting to myself that knowing Photoshop rather well doesn’t mean you also probably, kinda-sorta know Illustrator automatically, I’ve decided to take the plunge and teach myself Illustrator. Behold! My first creation! It’s a fucking bad-ass dinosaur, bitches!
If you love electronic music, Twitter and OS X, you need to download Tweet-a-Sound immediately. It’s a MAX/MSP-based synthesizer for OS X that’s tricked out to tweet! It’s a not sonic Twitpic, either. Rather than simply turn your creation into an audio file and linking to it, it sends it as text. If someone wants to hear the sound you’ve made, all they have to do is copy it from their web browser or Twitter client and paste it into Tweet-a-Sound. The application uses this long and rather cryptic string of numbers to set the appropriate parameters on the synth and play it.
You can produce sounds that last anywhere from 0.1 seconds all the way to a full minute. When you’re finished fiddling with frequencies and your waveform is ready for transmission, you can either send the tweet straight from Tweet-a-Sound or copy it and paste it into the Twitter client of your choice. Messages are prepended with #tas so that other synth geeks can find your work easily with a simple search.
I made a few sounds with it, the source of which you can also find with a Twitter search. I’ve also made mp3s of two of them if you’d just rather listen here.
The first sound is exactly how Tweet-a-Sound plays it, I only boosted the volume slightly in post-production.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
For this next one, instead of making the sound and then playing it back once to record the direct output, I used Tweet-a-Sound to restart its playback periodically. I also changed parameters on the synth whilst it was playing. This audio file cannot be expressed in a tweet, of course, as only its initial settings can, but it shows that you can use the application for more than its main intended purpose.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
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